Dominika Gruziel holds a PhD degree in Comparative Gender Studies. Since September 2020, she has been Senior Researcher and Coordinator in the ERC project “Social Politics in European Borderlands, 1870” (Sociobord), which proposes to conceptualize histories of European welfare schemes from a perspective of the continent’s borderlands and state border phenomena. Gruziel is currently developing a study on social protection for children in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands after the Second World War as part of her fellowship with this project. Before her current employment, she was a visiting lecturer at the Gender Studies Department at Central European University, Budapest, where she taught courses on histories of women’s movements, the history of feminist and gender theories, and the interrelations between gender and religion. Between 2012 and 2016, she was also involved in several interdisciplinary and comparative projects in social policies and gender equality at the CEU Center for Policy Studies, CEU Center for European Union Research, and The Budapest Institute. Her research responsibilities included examining the relations between the policy-making processes, the involvement of religious institutions, and the third-sector mobilization in generating gender equality legislation. As a Research Fellow in the project bEUcitizen “All rights reserved? Barriers towards European CITIZENship”, she overlooked the research studies on the attitudes towards gender equality, family policies and migrant workers of the European far-right parties during the electoral campaign to the European Parliament in 2015. Between 2016 and 2019, as a Marie Curie Fellow at the EUI, Gruziel researched the social and political mobilization of Polish Catholic women before 1918 from a transnational perspective.
While residing in the C²DH, she works with Professor Machteld Venken on an upcoming special issue, “Children, welfare and intersectional constellations of the mixed economies of welfare in the European Borderlands” to be published in Childhood journal in November 2024. She has acquired a keen hobby interest in great apes after a study trip to Kenya and Rwanda last year.